Cleaner, Cheaper Electricity

By the fall of 2006, competition over parking in VistaPrint’s Lexington lot led its leaders to conclude it was time to move again, to a bigger space across the street.

As part of its earlier move in the summer of 2004, the company had inherited a data center in the basement of its existing building. The “free data center,” as Branham calls it, housed 18 racks of equipment by the time he arrived. Most of the gear was used for internal IT systems and development. They’d probably want to move that operation across the street with them. Or would they? The rework of the data center in Bermuda got Cebula and Branham thinking. If they could cut energy costs by making different gear choices, was there anything to be gained by moving the bulk of the Lexington data center elsewhere? While researching the Bermuda data center revamp, Cebula had learned that the power market in Massachusetts was perhaps the most expensive one in North America. “Outside of maybe Hawaii,” she adds. “Doing those cost comparisons opened our eyes and got us to run some of the numbers on power at different possible locations.”

VistaPrint had recently opened a 68,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Windsor, Canada, which could be expanded to accommodate a 100-rack data center. Cebula charged Branham with creating a business case for three options: building the new data center in the new Lexington space, building it in Windsor, or outsourcing it.

Unlike most IT departments, Vista­Print had all the information it needed to make the analysis—from real estate costs to electric bills—at hand. The majority of IT shops are in the dark about their data center energy costs because facilities management pays the bills. Facilities and IT tend to operate on different planes. “Facilities people know how much power is being used, but they don’t know anything about the equipment,” says Koomey. The result is what the Uptime Institute’s Brill calls “the invisible crisis.” IT has little incentive to make more conservative choices about power consumption, and the results are not sustainable. AFCOM, an association for data center professionals, predicts that power failures or power limits will halt data center operations at more than 90 percent of companies over the next five years.

“Not a lot of IT people get down into the building of data centers,” admits Branham. “We definitely understand the total cost perspective,” says Cebula. “But even we were a bit surprised when doing the analysis of actual energy consumption.”